Art museums and commercial art galleries display paintings and other hanging works of art in arrangements which may change yearly, monthly or even daily. In a museum, for example, works which are on loan or in a traveling exhibit may be temporarily displayed and permanent works rearranged to accommodate them. In a commercial art gallery, the works may require rearrangement as particular pieces are sold, or as new pieces are acquired. Such re-arrangement, using prior picture-hanging hardware, requires drilling holes in the gallery walls, to accommodate the re-location of picture hooks or similar hardware. Accordingly, each time a painting is moved to a new location, a new hole is drilled for the associated picture-hanging hardware and a hole left at the previous location.
Eventually, there are so many holes in the walls that the paintings cannot be rearranged to adequately cover them. The holes must thus be filled-in and the wall repainted, before the works can be displayed in a new arrangement. The filling-in of the holes and the re-painting of the gallery walls is both time consuming and expensive.
Re-arranging displays is not easily done in situations in which molding hooks and wires are used to hang the works, instead of hooks fastened directly to the walls. While no new holes need to be drilled to re-locate a particular painting, re-stringing may be required if the painting is to rest higher or lower on the wall. Thus re-arrangement of such a display is not a particularly easy task. Moreover, molding hooks are not particularly suited for use in galleries in which works are often hung in vertical alignment at varying heights. What is needed is a system for displaying art work which allows both vertical and horizontal rearrangement of the works without the drilling of holes for hardware or the re-stringing of the paintings.